Abstract:
After a long drought, Financings of the Fortnight is back with the rain you crave. And after an even longer drought, a drizzle of biotech IPOs in late 2009 has raised hopes for a good crop of newly public companies in 2010.

BIND Biosciences: This largely under-wraps nanotechnology company made news on a pair of fronts recently, landing former Sequus Pharmaceuticals President Scott Minick as its new president and CEO on Jan. 11 and then announcing an $11 million Series C on Jan. 13 led by David H. Koch's DHK Investment, with participation from prior investors Polaris Venture Partners, Flagship Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners and NanoDimension. As a managing director at ARCH, Minick was serving on BIND's board of directors when the board asked him to take over as CEO. In an interview from the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, Minick told IN VIVO Blog that his firm plans to use the Series C money to get BIND's lead candidate, BIND-014 - a formulation of the oncologic Taxotere contained in a nanoparticle shell - into clinical development by the end of 2010. BIND uses its Medical Nanoengineering platform to attempt to develop safer and/or more efficacious versions of oncology, cardiovascular and anti-inflammatory drugs through differential delivery and controlled drug exposure to diseased tissue. "The idea being we get very high concentrations of a known, proven drug to the site of the tumor and, in preclinical models, [we] have demonstrated increased efficacy as well as improved safety," Minick said.